Use the Windows Desktop

Its common for Developers to add files and folders in a variety of places. The favourite seems to be the root of the C: Drive.

Its not unusual to go to a dev machine and find a multitiude of folders of the lines "XMLStuff", "test1", "trest2", "qwerty" etc on the machine.

You'd think they weren't Windows Developers. The only reason that anyone would want to do that is if they lived in the command line.

If you need to be in the command line all the time surely it means you don't know how to set up your machine to be productive?

For example, I have all of my data, projects, code, documentation etc on my desktop in specific folders. All I need to backup is my user profile. If you dont have a backup facility then all you need to do is perform that one copy operation and you have all you need.

Heres another thing... Further to my earlier post about using environment variables in the Windows Explorer address bar, when you have a folder on your desktop Windows Explorer provides it as an autocomplete option. In other words to get to my folder data on my desktop all i need to do is open Windows Explorer if it isn't already (WindowsKey->E), go to the address bar (Alt-D) and type data.